Unusual Pictures: "Calcified" Birds, Bats Found at African Lake

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Unusual Pictures: "Calcified" Birds, Bats Found at African Lake

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Stony Swallow

A "calcified" swallow sings in stony silence along northern Tanzania's Lake Natron (map), which contains so much soda and salt that it would "strip the ink of my Kodak film boxes in a few seconds," according to photographer Nick Brandt.

Thure Cerling, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, said by email that the animals in Brandt's photographs likely died of natural causes. Since there are few predators in the area, their bodies remain and become salt-encrusted when the lake's water level drops.

However, Brandt said that many people in the region have seen birds crash-land into the water. So he believes the birds and bats were confused by the sky's reflection in the lake and killed when they hit the water.

The animals probably aren't truly calcified, but are coated with sodium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate, said Cerling, who has researched the chemistry of Africa's Rift Valley lakes.

"There is almost no calcium in the lake, although the inflowing fresh waters have calcium, which precipitates as it mixes with the high-pH alkaline waters of the lake."

Jaimi Butler, of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Utah, said that on the shoreline of the northern arm of the Great Salt Lake, she has found birds that are "pickled"—so encrusted in salt you can pick them up and they will stay in the same position they were lying in.

Butler added that healthy birds do frequent the lake, so the dead animals may be ones that succumbed due to sickness or other causes.

Photograph courtesy Nick Brandt

Regal Eagle

A fish eagle seems to strike a regal pose in a 2012 picture—"alive again in death," according to Brandt.